Radiant Comics

Why does life have to seem so long one day and so short the next? Can’t time get its act together? I’m tired of this “time is relative” crap. I need some consistency in my universe! If there are no rules at all people will start eating ice cream for breakfast. Madness will ensue.

Another slow week for me at the comic shop (I’m getting tired of writing that). I only got one of my regulars this week: Love and Rockets #16. In an attempt to find a new book to read I purchased two issues of “Strange Girl”. Numbers seven and eight and it is published by image. I’ll let you know how they are.

The NFL draft is now a fixture on TV. ESPN has been presenting it for years now from start to finish as a two day event on the last weekend in April. Purely as a television event it ranks up there with the International Silly Putty Championship but I love it.

The draft starts Saturday at noon and runs until ten at night for just the first three rounds. They do it all over again on Sunday for rounds four through seven. On Saturday, in the first round, each team has 15 minutes to make a pick. There are 32 teams and this can take a long time. I think last year’s draft set a record for the first round at five hours and change. The shortest first round was three hours and change. The draft runs way too long to ever pay attention to the whole thing but you don’t have to.

ESPN has lots of commentators and experts to fill the waiting time with information and blather about the players being drafted. It is one of those jobs that is great because it doesn’t matter if you are wrong. One guy says a player is a great pick and the next guy says he’s a bum. On Monday no one even cares who said what because it can take years to tell if a player is good or bad and no one goes back and checks who said what on draft day.

Players take years to develop. That is what makes the draft such a unique event. It is important because you have to draft good young talent but you really can’t judge the success of a draft until three to five years down the road. A successful draft is when, four years down the road, two of the seven players you have drafted are starting for your team. It is all a crap shoot but no on can tell if their team is rolling sevens or snake eyes. You can only guess and listen to the “experts”.

The reason for the draft being such a fun event is that football has such a short season compared to all other professional sports. It lasts from opening day in September to the Super Bowl in January (the first weekend in February recently). Five months of football a year is all we get. Other sports have seasons seven or eight months long but with football the off-season is longer than the season itself. Just one game a week too. So the NFL draft is an oasis of football in the middle of a long off season. A reason to gather friends together.

For years now a handful of friends have gathered at my house for the NFL draft. We turn on the TV and mostly ignore it until our team, the New York Giants picks. We munch on some snacks, talk some football, order some pizza and hit the back yard to play some Trac Ball. There is a Wham-O flashback game for you. A good time is had by all. I’m for any reason to gather together with friends.

There are some great football moments in the draft too. A highlight is waiting for the New York Jets to make their pick. The Jets haven’t been a very good team for a long time and as a consequence they often have a high draft pick (the worst team gets to pick first and the Super Bowl winner picks last). Since the draft is now a TV event it is held in a theatre (Radio City this year) and fans can attend. Plenty of Jets fans attend because it is held in NYC. And they boo. I can’t blame them. The Jets have a history of picking the wrong guy on draft day. Sure any team can pick the wrong guy. Sure fire can’t miss prospects miss all of the time. Like I said, the draft is a crap shoot, but the Jets have a way of passing over the sure fire can’t miss guy in favor of the “why the hell would they ever pick him?” guy. So the Jets fans boo and wring their hands in despair. Not every year but enough years for ESPN to have a highlight clip of Jets fans moaning in pain and pounding the table in frustration. I feel their pain but it’s funny if you are not a Jets fan. This year the Jets made some good picks and the fans were satisfied so my friends and I were robbed of our amusement. Oh, well.

Four more months until the season starts.

Time and how we measure it is a tricky thing. I often ask myself, “When did such and such happen?” and I almost always think, “A few years ago”. No matter how long ago the event actually was that is usually my first thought. At least for things from the last 10 years or so.

The standard associations for remembering time are easier in our youth. They are our grade levels. I can remember when things happened by what grade I was in when they happened. Grade level is a constant measurement of time that we all experience and makes for an easy reference point. All the way up through college I can figure out when things happened by remembering if I was a sophomore or a senior. Easy system.

After school things get a little more shapeless. Time takes on a new meaning that isn’t broken down into semesters or quarters. “One long endless summer job” I overheard a student say as he expressed his fear of what life would be like after graduation.

Jobs are another way people mark time but they aren’t as reliable. Some people have many jobs and some few. I think the fewer jobs one has the harder it is to mark time by them. After five or ten years at a job it all blurs together. If you change jobs every few years that may offer a better stick to measure against but jobs suffer from another problem. People generally don’t like them. Maybe people who have great jobs that are fulfilling and pay well remember every moment of them but most people I know don’t want to think about their job when they are not there. Often the last thing a person wants to think about is their job; therefore making a lousy marker for time.

I think it is children who give people back their standard associations with time. After someone has kids their thinking about their lives usually breaks down into two parts: before they had kids and after they had kids. This is not only because having children is a huge change in one’s life and a parent has a whole new person to be responsible for but because a parent gets his or her time markers back. Gone is the amorphous relationship of, “When did that take place?” and back is the relationship of “That happened when little Timmy was two”. A child’s age and then grade level are the new markers.

Grade levels change at the same time for all children and this is why I think they eventually take over as time markers from a child’s age. The first think I think is, “My senior year of High School” and the second is 1983-1984. All children are the same “age” as someone in the same grade despite being six months older or younger.

What brought this whole time thing up was that I went back and read some old comics. They were from the series “Mage: The Hero Discovered”. I remember when I first bought the series back in 1988 or so because I was in my senior year of college. Then, many years later, its sequel “Mage: The Hero Defined” came out. I wondered to myself, “When did the second Mage series come out?” and then I thought, “A few years ago”. So I looked it up. It was published from 1998-1999. Seven years ago? Where did time go? I was fine with the first volume being seventeen years ago because I had a marker for it and understood its place in time. Since I have no time marker for the sequel it disturbs me that seven years ago and three years ago mean about the same thing to me.

Comic books seem to emphasize my lack of time markers. Movies don’t. If I look up what year some movie came out, lets say Jurassic Park 2 (1997 I just looked it up), it never disturbs me when I see the date. TV shows can get me a little nostalgic, maybe because style on TV changes so often, but it never disturbs me when I look up what year a show came out.

The periodic nature of comic books could be an answer. They come out on a regular schedule; usually monthly or bi-monthly (there is Planetary time, a joke for all the comic book fans out there). They also come out all year round unlike a TV show which has a season with reruns thrown in too. Comics can be steady like a ticking clock.

Comics are also objects. They are dated and you can grab every issue of Spider-Man from 1977-1978 and watch time go by as you handle each issue. A comic from 1953 existed in 1953 and is older than a lot of us. Time is an integral part of comic books and whenever I look at one to see when it came out I hold time in my hand. That’s a tricky thing.

Do you know what I am tired of? Genetic engineering. At least in fiction that is. I don’t have any exposure to real genetic engineering. At least I don’t think I do. Is it in all of our food yet? It’s the plot device of genetic engineering that I have had enough of.

In the 50s and 60s it was radioactivity that made all of the monsters. Godzilla and all those giant beasts were made, or at least woken up, by radioactivity. In the movies radioactivity made every mundane creature grow to extra large proportions. From ants and spiders to lizards and apes if it got just the right amount of radiation it was gettin’ large and going on a rampage. And that forty foot woman too. Be afraid; the atomic age is here and running wild.

Radiation made a lot of the super-heroes who were born in the 60’s. Spider-Man was bitten by that radioactive spider, the Hulk was pelted by gamma rays, and the Fantastic Four were bombarded by cosmic rays. There are plenty more where they came from. A bar of radioactive whatever blinded Daredevil right in the middle of a Manhattan street and then rolled into the sewer and created the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (but that was twenty years later). Radiation could mutate for good as well as make giant monsters.

Yes, fiction writers thought radiation and its power to rearrange atoms would change the human race and offer us all sorts of options for the future. And give us super powers to boot. Who doesn’t want super powers?

In short: if you ever needed to create a hero or villain you didn’t need a whole back story filled with events and motivations. You needed some radiation. It explained everything.

Now we look back at those times and the notion of radiation doing everything as quaint. Those silly writers in the past. Didn’t they know that radioactivity mostly kills you? Super powers, c’mon.

We are so much smarter. After all, now we have genetic engineering.

Some time in the 90s, I’m not sure exactly when, almost every new monster and super-hero was born of genetic engineering. I’m watching season two episodes of the X-Files (1993-4) and there is a lot of genetic engineering but still some radiation monsters too. Radiation was almost dead at that point but genetic engineering was just getting started. Nowadays almost every new super hero dreamed up has the same origin. The are all born of a secret government project. It doesn’t matter what government, sometimes it’s a corporation, sometimes it’s on another planet but it is always a genetic engineering project.

As tiresome as that is what I find most amazing is people. I’ve mentioned I’m bored of genetic engineering before and compared it to radiation and somebody always says, “but the difference is that genetic engineering is real and they will be able to do all of those things one day”. That is what was thought about radiation! No one is ever going to grow wings and shoot blasts out of their eyes because of genetic engineering! Nope, no way, not gonna happen. Sure our food might be more resistant to climate and disease and we might live longer and healthier but super strength, flight and hanging out in the vacuum of space?

Years from now when the next all purpose plot device comes along we will be looked on as the quaint ones who thought genetic engineering could do anything. Anything the plot called for that is.